We're animals. We're born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.

We tap our toes to chaste love songs about the silvery moon without recognizing them as hymns to copulation.

the novel is inherently a political instrument, regardless of its subject. It invites you - more than invites you, induces you - to live inside another person's skin. It creates empathy. And that's the antidote to bigotry. The novel doesn't just tell you about another life, which is what a newspaper would do. It makes you live another life, inhabit another perspective. And that's very important.

I concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

Mother could go for one year without food, but not one day without her lip sticks.

You know things are bad when a woman without any legs and who recently lost two of her own kids feels sorry for you.

Codi: Gives you the willies, doesn't it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop? [referring to cliff dwellings] Loyd: No worse than raising up kids where the front yard ends in a freeway.